Operator says increases were made to take into account January VAT rise, previously not applied to Simplicity prepay services
O2 has raised the prices of its ‘Simplicity’ (SIM only) prepay tariffs by up to 2.50 for new and upgrading customers in order to take in January’s VAT rise and continue providing its “unlimited texts” service to its prepay customers.
Customers already on prepay Simplicity will remain on their existing allowance, at their existing price, the operator said.
Top up options have increased from 5, 10 and 15 to 7.50, 10.50 and 15.50.
The operator said the increased prices were due to the inclusion of January’s VAT rise, which it had previously only applied to its pay monthly Simplicity customers.
O2 said customers could now choose from three ‘basic’ Simplicity prepay allowances which are as follows: zero minutes and unlimited texts for 7.50, 100 minutes and 500 texts for 10.50 and 300 minutes and unlimited texts for 15.50.
As well as increasing tariff prices, O2 will now sell prepay Simplicity data allowance separately from minutes and texts in order to create more choice for their customers.
The separate data bundles are priced at 3 for 100MB of data, 6 for 500MB of data and 10 for 1GB of data and are the same as bundles offered to O2′s pay monthly customers.
An O2 statement said: “As we announced earlier in the year, we made an exception with Pay and Go simplicity customers, and chose to delay the VAT increase on their allowances in January.
“As part of this refresh, we have now aligned the VAT rate with our other tariffs to 20 per cent, which accounts for a proportion of the increase in the 10.50 and 15.50 allowances.
The operator said the decision to allow customer to purchase data separately came down to the fact that different people want different things when topping up.
O2 said: “As mobile usage evolves and internet on the mobile reaches the mass market, we believe there is no longer room to segregate or stereotype customers.”
“True choice is being offered what the customer wants, not what we prescribe.”
